


You Had Me at Hang In There

by oddmonster



Category: Riptide (TV)
Genre: Light BDSM, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 03:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/669798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oddmonster/pseuds/oddmonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ted Quinlan's not about to let some jumped-up little know-it-all like Murray Bozinsky get under his skin. Not one bit. So he has zero explanation for why the guy's currently tied to his kitchen table.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Had Me at Hang In There

**Author's Note:**

  * For [der_tanzer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/der_tanzer/gifts).



Quinlan leaned back in his chair and put his feet on his desk as Murray continued to state his case in no uncertain terms.

"--and furthermore, lieutenant, you're overlooking the fact that the Riptide Detective Agency has, between them, over ten years of experience tracking down miscreants of this nature! Criminals! Bad g--"

"More than."

Murray peered at Quinlan questioningly. "What?"

"You said you three bozos have 'over ten years of experience.' It should be 'more than ten years of experience,' Bozinsky. I'd've thought a real smart guy like you'd know that."

"...You're right, Lieutenant. It should be--I hadn't realized you knew so much about grammar. But as I was saying--"

"Bozinsky, there's a helluva lot you don't know about me. Grammar's just the tip of the iceberg. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some real ‘bad guys’ to catch."

"Lieutenant!"

Quinlan swung his feet down off the desk and gestured to two detectives in the outer office. "Officers, why don't you escort Mr. Bozinsky there--oh, excuse me," Quinlan amended as Murray held up a finger, "Doctor Bozinsky the hell out of my office and out of this station house before he does something we'll both regret."

"Now wait just a minute, Lieutenant!"

The two big detectives grinned and hoisted Murray between them, one under each arm. They turned him around and carried him, kicking and protesting, out of Quinlan's office and through the open bullpen of the King Harbor Police Department.

He fought and wriggled the whole way and Quinlan watched him go, unable to tear his eyes away from the long, skinny limbs and that sweet little ass, wriggling around like a nightcrawler on a hook.

Try as he might, the rest of the afternoon, Quinlan was unable to focus on anything else.

\---

The problem was, Quinlan realized, that Doctor or not, Murray Bozinsky was entirely his type. Brainy. Fierce. Stubborn. Stick-slender, without an ounce of fat, like a baby bird, maybe. And from the first time they'd butted heads, Quinlan knew he had a problem on his hands. Or, more aptly, knew the kinds of problems he'd love to have on his hands.

Every cop knew stakeouts were, for the most part, a time-suck; hour after hour stuck in an unmarked car with, more often than not, some mouth-breathing rookie who just wanted to bitch about his old lady in the hopes he could bond his way up the ladder.

Quinlan had a surefire cure for both rookies and stakeouts: Murray Bozinsky.

He was a good enough cop he could leave his eyes in place on the target and let his brain run wild. A good half of his fantasies involved eating that cute, flat ass the kid had; pinning him down, hard, not letting him move an inch while Quinlan parted Murray’s cheeks and buried his face in what he was convinced would be the tightest, sweetest little hole he'd ever tasted. And he could imagine Murray's response, too. Every gasp, every moan and writhe, Quinlan had rehearsed 'em all, over and over and over again.

If he wasn't mistaken, Bozinsky still needed his cherry popped. If not with a woman (Quinlan snorted) then at least he'd never taken it up the ass, experiencing the sensation of a fat hard cock where it was obvious would do the guy the most good.

Quinlan could lose hours that way, entire shifts. More and more, all he wanted to do was imagine the feeling of Murray's hot, slender body against him, under him, begging for release. Begging for more, harder, right there, Ted, right there, oh yes.

Problem was, the more he thought about it, the less Quinlan liked returning to his cold, lonely reality. The one where he wasn't stretching Murray's tight hole with a special curved, extra-thick plug he'd ordered just to drive the kid past the point of distraction, making him wear it under his jeans for hours and hours while Quinlan watched and knew and enjoyed how--

A knock on the driver's side window interrupted Quinlan's reverie.

He looked around, noting the way the light had changed. The way the lights in the parking lot were winking on around him, illuminating all the empty spaces.

Another knock.

Quinlan rolled down the window of his shining black 1968 Ford Falcon and found himself staring up into the concerned face of Officer Leonard Briggs (inner Sunset patrol; three years with the department; total fucking kiss-ass, Quinlan's brain helpfully supplied).

"Problem with your engine there, Lieutenant?"

"What are you doing out here, Briggs? Shouldn't you be off helping little old ladies cross the street? Not got anything better to do than skulk around in parking lots, looking in other people's cars?"

The young patrolman looked taken aback. "Just wondering if you needed a jump, or if you were having car trouble, Lieutenant. I know a little bit about engines. Just wanted to see if you needed my help."

_Only help I need is to go home and find Bozinsky naked as a jaybird and tied to my kitchen table_ , Quinlan thought. But instead he said, “Well I sure appreciate the offer, Briggs, but I’m guessing what you know about engines I can stick in my shoe and still have room for both feet. Now, instead of trying to ingratiate yourself with me, which I assure you you’re failing at, how about you get back out on the streets and keep a lookout for some real criminals.” _Like Bozinsky in those shorts he busts out during the summer, Quinlan thought. Legs like those should be illegal, that’s for damn sure._

Briggs looked abashed. “Sorry, Lieutenant, it’s just that my wife’s brother has a car almost exactly like this. I mean, it’s a ‘63, but these old cars are all the same. He says it’s got a problem with the carburetor and no matter how often he adjusts it...”

The kid launched into a confused spiel about his brother in law’s old Ford, seemingly oblivious to Quinlan’s glare. The lieutenant waited, gripping the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

Finally, Briggs wound down and tapped the roof of Quinlan’s car twice in quick succession. “Guess I’d better let you get going, huh, Lieutenant?”

Quinlan refrained from ripping the kid’s hand off by picturing Murray naked and bound in the passenger seat, skinny little thighs spread wide. The kid kept talking and Murray rolled his eyes, grinning around a ballgag.

Quinlan jumped.

“--you take care on the 405, if you’re going home that way. Last I checked, traffic was backed up a good half-mile.”

Still staring at the apparition sharing his ride home, Quinlan muttered something about surface streets and gunned it, heading out across the parking lot with his tires squealing. He took the exit onto Delgado hard and mean, oblivious to the angry honking and one very confused young patrolman left scratching his head in the empty lot.

\---

As soon as he got home, Quinlan headed straight for the fridge and pulled out an icy Michelob. He stood in the cool of the open door and rolled the bottle across his forehead, letting the condensation trickle down his skin and into his eyes.

Murray had vanished by the second stoplight and Quinlan honestly didn’t know how that made him feel. Sure, at least half Quinlan’s fantasies involved restraints of some kind, but mainly because he was fairly sure otherwise he’d never get a chance with Murray. Hell, if the guy knew half the things Quinlan pictured in a day, he’d probably run as far and as fast as those skinny little legs could carry him.

“Actually, Lieutenant, you have no evidence to suggest that I wouldn’t welcome the attentions of an older, more experienced partner.”

Quinlan froze in the vee of the open fridge door.

He opened his eyes cautiously. Staring back at him from the pebbled surface of the freezer was a magnet with a small, wide-eyed orange kitten hanging from a cartoon tree branch. “Hang in there!” it instructed.

_Well, all right, then._

Quinlan turned around.

Murray lay face-down and naked on the lieutenant’s kitchen table. Black nylon restraints anchored his wrists and ankles to the legs of the table, leaving his ass open and exposed.

Quinlan dropped his beer. It hit the hard floor and shattered, splashing Quinlan’s jeans and shoes with beer.

Murray rotated one shoulder, as if working out a kink. “I’ll admit you were right about my not having had a male partner before. But in my defense, the Kirkheimer Study, released last year by the University of Minnesota, indicated that for a wide cross-section of men who formed lasting same-sex partnerships, the average age of their first homosexual experience was twenty-seven. Rounding to the nearest year, of course.”

The word “homosexual” snapped Quinlan out of his trance. “Bullshit.”

“In fact, the...average...what?” Murray craned his head around to look Quinlan in the eyes.

“Bullshit. Most guys I know have played at least one round of hide the sausage and the story’s always the same: two young guys wanting to experiment, overwhelmed by hormones while one or both of them work out whether they prefer the pole to the hole. Trust me,” Quinlan said darkly, “it usually ends badly.”

“That’s not fair, Lieutenant. You’re generalizing, possibly based on a bad experience from your youth--”

“Watch it, kid. Hallucination or not, I could still knock you through next week.”

Murray nodded. “Of course you could, Lieutenant. It’s one of the things that attracts me to you. Rugged virility combined with the implied threat of controlled violence and repressed anger. The idea that I might be the one who could help you find an outlet for those emotions. I could offer up my body to serve as your safety valve! But back to what I was saying, you’re most likely projecting your remembered fear and frustration onto the possibility of you and I as a romantic partnership. And that’s not fair, Lieutenant. It’s just not!”

“You and me,” Quinlan said automatically. “You know, for a genius, Bozinsky, you’re sure terrible at grammar.”

Murray frowned. “Only in English. For some reason, I’m much better with tonal languages, like Thai and Lao. And of course, all the dialects of Chinese. But that goes without saying.”

“Bullshit,” Quinlan said again. The word felt like a bulwark against the very strange thing currently happening in his kitchen. “If we’re gonna discuss grammatical structure, including the phrase ‘that goes without saying’ is like bringing a bull to a rodeo then insisting you’re one of those animal rights wackos. It defeats the purpose entirely.”

Murray opened his mouth to respond, then stopped, looking thoughtful. “You know, Lieutenant, you’re right. I guess I used that phrase without thinking, as a broad generalization implying that a fact I’ve introduced into conversation should be accepted by the listener without examination or analysis. I guess it’s a verbal tic of sorts. You know, the way Nick ends a lot of his sentences with ‘you know?’ or the way Cody calls everyone ‘buddy’ or ‘pal’.”

Quinlan snorted. “I was wondering when you were gonna get around to those two beach bunny friends of yours.” Ignoring the mess on the floor, he pulled another beer from the fridge then shut the door firmly. “I suppose you’re gonna tell me you never made time with either of them?” Quinlan used his keys to open the beer, then stepped over the broken glass and foam to sink into the chair closest to Murray’s head.

“Regardless of the neuroscience involved in free will, Lieutenant, no one can make time, no matter how much they try. Causality and uh, some other laws of physics you probably don’t want to hear about constrain the creation and destruction of time as a substance. Simply put, there is only a fixed amount of time in the universe, no matter how much we try to work around Rescher’s theory that asymmetry of causal relation is unrelated to the asymmetry of any mode of implication that contraposes.” Murray’s glasses slipped down his nose and he tossed his head to get them back up. “That’s ridiculous, of course, because any third or even second year student of physics can tell you, asymmetry is only one part of the obstacles standing between modern science and time travel.” He tossed his head again. “And the others are much more substantial. Take manipulability, for instance--”

“Oh, let’s.” Quinlan took a long swig of his beer.

“Well that’s just the point! The whole crux of manipulation theory requires a universe in which an unbiased observer acts upon unrelated bodies and alters the course of their trajectory. The laws constraining the ways in which those bodies are altered are where things get really interesting.”

“Trust me, kid: there’s no such thing as an unbiased observer.”

“What? Of course there’s -- oh! You’re speaking from a legal perspective.” Murray tossed his head again, tilting it first to one side then the other. The glasses slid lower. “I suppose if you were to apply the laws of criminal prosecution to first-order physics, then truly speaking, the observer would be biased simply by the act of--” Murray tossed his head again. “Being observed, but Lieutenant, the likelihood of that happening is--”

Quinlan couldn’t stand it any longer. He reached out to where Murray’s glasses lay, wanting to push them back up.

His fingers encountered empty space.

It was at once disheartening and a relief; a relief for to realize he really was hallucinating and disheartening to realize he really was hallucinating. And that his hallucination was taking the form of Murray Bozinsky, naked and bound to his kitchen table.

Still, hallucination or not, Murray’s glasses slid back up that long, knife-edged nose, bringing an expression of relief to the whole spectral face.

“Thank you,” Murray said. Behind the glasses, his eyes were huge and brown, a little more vulnerable. “I’m babbling,” he said quickly. “I do that when I’m nervous.”

“Nervous? What the hell you have to be nervous about? I’m the one seeing things.”

“Lieutenant -- Ted, if I may --”

“Seeing how your gentlemen are currently riding my furniture I’d say it’s safe to say you may.” Quinlan drank some more beer, as much to stop his mouth from being stupid as anything else.

“You asked me about Nick and Cody,” Murray said softly, “and I just wanted to reassure you, I’m not sleeping with them.”

“You’re not.”

“No, Ted, I’m not.”

“Well, why in the hell not? Coupla muscle-bound hulks like them, you so sorely in need of a good hard fuck, it doesn’t make sense, Bozinsky.”

Murray looked down at the kitchen floor and mumbled.

Quinlan frowned. Sitting up, he leaned closer. “Run that by me one more time?”

“I said, ‘Maybe I need more than a f--a um, physical connection. I’m not, I’m not really the playboy type.”

“You don’t say.”

“Poke fun all you like, but I’ve never managed to uncouple the act of physical intimacy with that of emotional intimacy and the universal search for connection.”

Quinlan set his beer down on the table next to Murray’s shoulder. “You haven’t.”

Murray shook his head sadly. He arched again in his bonds, stretching and shivering a little, and Quinlan was reminded that California, when you got right down to it, could be a damn cold place. Even if you were only a hallucination strapped to a man’s kitchen table.

Murray stretched again, muscles and tendons clearly visible under that pale, cream-colored skin. Murray was hairier than Quinlan would have imagined, covered in a dusting of fine brown hair like lace. Quinlan approved. Very specifically, one particular part of Quinlan approved very strongly. “You cold, kid?”

“In more ways than you could imagine, Lieutenant.” His voice was barely a whisper. “But...”

“But what? Out with it.”

“But...I just wanted you to know, I’m not some - some gigolo whose emotions can remain in the background while you cavort with his body.”

“Cavort, huh?”

“Well, that’s what you’ve been imagining all this time, haven’t you?”

Quinlan’s blood ran cold.

“You just see me as a physically viable sexual partner, someone who could provide you with a highly pleasurable outlet for your needs and desires. But I wanted you to know I’m much more than that. At least, I want to be, for the right person. I need someone who wants to challenge me, and then support the fact that I’ve learned to never back down. To fight for the position I believe in. And even now, I say the word ‘position’ and all you can think of is--”

“No, you’ve got me all wrong, kid.” Quinlan leaned forward. “I mean sure, I think of that. What red-blooded man wouldn’t? But all that other stuff you said, about never backing down, about fighting. I’m looking for that too.”

“You are?”

“Oh hell, yes. Trust me, kid. I very much am.”

A curious, hopeful look entered Murray’s eyes. “Prove it.”

\---

Dawn slid through the blinds, icy gray sunshine and a heat Quinlan had long since stopped pretending to feel. He opened his eyes and stretched, feeling the sharp crick in his neck, his back and bad knee stiff and angry. But more than that, Quinlan looked across the vast, empty surface of his kitchen table and felt something so much more painful than hurt, so much more profound than loss. Confusion warred with anger, winning only slightly.

Quinlan rose, and his foot nudged something solid.

On the floor at his feet sat two empty brown beer bottles. Other than that, the floor was spotless.

Quinlan sank back down into his chair, where he sat staring, long into the morning.

He stared over at the burnt orange phone, hanging on the wall next to the back door. The morning ticked by loudly, the grinning, googly-eyed cat clock on the wall marking every minute Quinlan sat there, trying to decide if he was going crazy. Or maybe he’d gone crazy and only now was starting to notice it. ‘Course, he wouldn’t put it past Bozinsky to have invented a way of telekintation or whatever the hell the word was, and got his sweet little ass over to Quinlan’s from the pier.

_Still, that doesn’t explain how he tied himself up now, does it?_

The thought that maybe it hadn’t been Murray he’d been talking to last night filled Quinlan with an unaccountable sadness, a hollow emptiness that took him by surprise.

The cat on the wall continued to grin inanely, tail swatting seconds out of the air like flies.

Finally, Quinlan couldn’t stand it any longer. He rose from the kitchen chair, joints creaking, and made his way over to the phone.


End file.
